I knew it would happen one of these days… they’re watching me now, tracking every word I say. Like acapnotic, I feel obligated to say something remotely related to programming (instead of just ranting about how I should be President).

I’ve been playing with nevow for weeks now, and I’m very impressed. I’ve been able to do so much that I wanted to do with Woven, but couldn’t, with only a modicum of effort. Porting my site to nevow was a breeze. I’m already working on new features and capabilities; the one feature I’m really psyched about is being able to edit page content on-the-fly using freeform.

My new content framework (which remains unnamed) consists of HTML templates and various types of content “nuggets”. Each nugget is a custom data object, representing text, HTML, Structured Text, Textile, a photo album, or whatever else. This is pretty docile, and it’s how my site works currently.

But, a-ha! Every nugget class in my new system implements TypedInterface, which means that nevow will do practically all the work involved in displaying forms that let you modify data over the web. Combined with nevow.guard, which wraps the entire site with pluggable authentication, I’ve got all the trappings of a wimpy CMS — except I’ve no intention of writing a blog.

The biggest issue is rewriting parts of freeform, something Donovan has been guiding me through. Currently, as I understand it, the Renderer which is generating the web resource is the only Configurable object to which freeform is able to post; we need to be able to define an arbitrary number of Configurables within a single resource, all of which can be posted to normally. (I managed to kludge this behavior before DP and I talked about it, but in a horribly messy, not-entirely-functional way.)

Aside from my personal web page, I’ve also been using nevow to write a web-based RSS aggregator. My goal is to create something akin to Bloglines or Flock, but right now it’s a poor substitute for either. But it works, and it was a snap to put together.

Development in nevow is unbelievably easier than it was in Woven. I’m happy to have so many cool things to distract me from my homework. Which reminds me, I won’t have any more homework in a few months. Anybody out there hiring? <grin/>